Google’s Motorola establishing a new office in Kitchener-Waterloo

Just a few days after BlackBerry Ltd. said that thousands of its staff will lose their jobs in the coming weeks, one of the embattled smartphone maker’s top competitors announced plans to set up a new office in the Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s backyard.

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On Wednesday, the Google Inc.-owned Motorola Mobility revealed it would be establishing a new engineering hub in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, with the goal of tapping into the deep talent pool located in an around Canada’s premiere technology centre.

There’s no question that BlackBerry — formerly known as Research In Motion — helped put Waterloo on the map as a technology hub, and just a few years ago, the spectre of substantial layoffs at the smartphone company could have proved disastrous for the local tech industry. But thanks to a bustling startup ecosystem, the expansion of satellite offices for U.S. tech firms and the influx of new mid-size companies, the Kitchener-Waterloo region appears to be capable of soldiering on despite BlackBerry’s struggles.

The new Motorola office, dubbed Motorola Kitchener-Waterloo is walking distance to Google’s current Waterloo region home in the city’s Tannery Building and a ten minute drive from BlackBerry’s global headquarters.

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Currently, there are only a handful of employees at Motorola Kitchener-Waterloo — which is actually located in a shared working space with several other companies — but the company is ready to go on a hiring spree.

“We’ve got big plans and we’re very optimistic.” said Derek Phillips, a former Google employee who is now engineering director for Motorola Canada. “We’re always looking for places where there’s lots of opportunity for growth and it’s not always easy to find places that have significant tech talent in a variety of areas, but especially mobile.”

Motorola is the second significant technology company in the past two weeks to announce plans to establish a presence in the Waterloo area. Last week, Square Inc. announced that the mobile payment startup was also setting up shop in the region.

BlackBerry revealed last week that the company plans to cut as many as 4,500 employees as the struggling smartphone maker attempts to trim costs and chart a new course in the smartphone industry after being overwhelmed by competition from Apple Inc.’s iPhone and devices running on Google Inc.’s Android software.

Mr. Phillips wouldn’t specifically identify the recently announced layoffs at BlackBerry as a hiring opportunity for Motorola, instead citing the wealth of talent coming from a variety of sources in the area, including local companies and the University of Waterloo, as the primary reason for establishing a hub in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Motorola — which was acquired by Google in 2011 in a deal valued at US$12.5-billion — has been planning to open an office in Waterloo for several months, Mr. Phillips said.

Despite BlackBerry’s decline, Waterloo’s technology workforce has grown steadily over the past few years, with dozens of new startups coming out of incubators like Communitech and VeloCity, in addition offices for global giants like Google.

Those in the industry believe the region is well positioned to weather the storm as BlackBerry officials sort out the future of the once mighty technology giant.

“It would have been a different story five years ago, but definitely the ecosystem now has matured significantly to the point where it is much more mature,” said Iain Klugman, chief executive of Communitech. “With what’s happened to BlackBerry in the last little while, it’s probably made room for some of it.

“There’s a big thirst for talent in town. The challenge for this community, and it will respond to that challenge, is about timing. This is a wave of talent that’s coming towards us, and we need to absorb it quickly.”